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Microsoft Attempts to Woo Students With 'Crowdsourced' Laptops
theodp writes "Q. What do Chris Brown and Steve Ballmer have in common? A. They both want you to Beg for It. GeekWire reports that Microsoft is touting its new Chip In program, a crowdfunding platform that allows students to 'beg' for select Windows 8 PCs and tablets that they can't afford on their own. Blair Hanley Frank explains, 'Students go to the Chip In website and choose one of the 20 computers and tablets that have been pre-selected by Microsoft. Microsoft chips in 10% of the price right off the bat, and then students are given a link to a "giving page" to send out to anyone they think might give them money. Once their computer is fully funded, Microsoft ships it to them.' Hey, what could go wrong?"
Then I don't think anyone wants one. Begging and debasing yourself for a computer makes sense, if you really need one. Doing it for a computer that suffers from delusions of being a tablet? What's the point?
So it's a 10% discount for spamming your contact list
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
...but it really doesn't help when this kind of project tries to get people to turn it into spam. Want to drive your early 1980s Vanagon through China on the Silk Road, and write a book about the experience? Good project for crowdsourcing (but didn't make its kickstarter goal). Want to record an album with your band or film a documentary on something super-nerdy? By all means give it a shot.
Poor student wanting to buy a device Microsoft picked for you? Just makes the whole concept of crowdsourcing look like what it is: begging. The appeal of crowdsourcing, in my opinion, is that if the project succeeds, something fun, interesting, or exciting gets brought back that the people who helped it happen get to enjoy. Not just the person who gathered the funds.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
1. microsoft already enjoys lock-in at most universities and private colleges. shit like outlook and sharepoint has unfortunately shoved years of well-maintained unix to the roadside in an effort for universities to seem more cutting edge. protracted multi-month outages (ahem, University of Kentucky) requiring expensive consultants drive alongside patch tuesday now in the race to time best wasted.
2. 90% of the engineering labs, the ones we slashdotters fondly pine for, are sadly Microsft lock stock and barrel. each desltop basically exists as a $500 PuTTY workstation.
id be willing to guess microsoft is trying to reduce the amount of apple on campus. in the arm and in the backpack of millions of students rests the most egregious chunk of the student loan, the macbook. Microsoft wants that few inches of space so badly they can taste the sweat off steves greasy forehead, but theyve failed catastrophically in the past and if history is any indicator, this will just serve to ever cement microsoft as the spreadsheet king. the Zune was a godless abortion, the netbook was an underpowered way to piss off university hackers, and the tablets are about the only thing left until you realize apple has been doing it better for years. Now we're going for the laptops...and its worth noting most $college macbooks run XP or 7 so as to comply with university requirements for courseware. Make no mistake however, they roll back over to mac whenever theres a party and someone needs to fire up a jukebox playlist fitting for kegstands.
making college kids beg wont work. at the end of the day sure, theyre accustomed to it with their parents but microsoft doesnt represent anything they inherently need that they cant already download off bittorrent or use a lab for. victory has defeated you microsoft, your ubiquity is the titration point at which college students simply dont care about your products. they all know windows, they all use it, but there is no fundamental 'want' or drive you can possibly conjure up that will spur kids to fall to their knees the way steve jobs could get them to.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So don't buy the machine.
Hopefully more linux users will start buying linux machines or bare OS machines and we can get some actual reasonable statistics.
Microsoft with another new half baked idea.
Painful to watch and execute me too ad campaign.
A day late and a dollar short.
Say what you will about them, the fuckers are consistent.
How EXACTLY is it a "big" problem? Its something that is trivial to disable if you don't want it and frankly if Torvalds wasn't constantly shitting out new kernels it really wouldn't be hard to get your kernel signed and use it in Linux.
Ironically the ones who usually scream about it being a "problem" don't seem to have this "problem" with Chromebooks even though unlike UEFI Secureboot the ONLY way to get around it in a Chromebook is to put in a page and a half of CLI garbage in "dev mode", completely wipe your drive (no dual booting allowed) and then and ONLY then can you use one of a few small select distros that will run on what should be just a bog standard X86 laptop. say what you will but at least with Secureboot I can dual boot and use any OS I want with the hardware.
As for TFA? sigh...Steve, Steve, Steve...give it the fuck up already! Win 8 is a bomb, nobody wants the damned thing, all you are doing now is embarrassing yourself.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
That 10% discount is almost as much money as you could save by forgoing Windows for something useable and free.
That doesn't sound like GP's problem, it sounds like ASUS' problem. Yours is accepting that "doesn't boot well from USB" is an acceptable state to sell a motherboard in.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.